


...and the Universal Bond

by burglebezzlement



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Canon-Typical Plot, Case Fic, Duct Tape, Gen, Magic, POV Outsider, Tourist Traps, jackalopes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-30 11:55:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10876266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: There are three things Roxie doesn't know about the weirdos standing in front of her: who they are, what they're looking for at the Abode of Wonders, and how they all just walked out of the bathroom without walking through the front door first.





	...and the Universal Bond

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_rck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/gifts).



> For the_rck. Your Yuletide letter last year mentioned being open to first person POV and changes in style that gave a new view on characters, which gave me an idea for a story from an outsider POV. 
> 
> For background, I should note that one of the developments in S3 involves everyday objects turning into artifacts due to exposure to magic.
> 
> I’d be lying if I said the Abode of Wonders, the tourist trap in this story, wasn’t a little bit inspired by the Mystery Shack from Gravity Falls, but it’s more inspired by various real-life tourist traps I’ve known.

The three of them walked out of the bathroom together, which is when I first noticed something was weird.

It’s a small bathroom. Big enough for one person. Maybe two, max. I’m the one who has to clean it at night, so I have a pretty good idea how big it is, only now three people were piling out of the door. The light looked all wrong, too. Mr. Hartley only has a crummy 40-watt CFL in there, so it’s usually dark, but the doorway looked like it was glowing behind them.

“— don’t know why we’re here,” the first guy said. He was a short dude, wearing a button-down shirt and a scarf. It’s not a look we usually see in Mule Butte, Montana.

“The clippings book sent us,” the woman said. She was shorter than me, red hair pulled up in two ponytails, wearing a pleated skirt with suspenders over a patterned shirt. Granny chic, maybe. “This place is right over a ley line. There must be something.” 

She looked up at the ceiling, like she was expecting to see something more interesting than old plaster with water stains.

The taller of the two guys shook his head. “You guys are useless.”

He left the other two standing by the bathroom door and came over to me. “Hullo,” he said. He was cute. Asian. Australian accent. “We’re the Librarians.”

I’d been looking at the three of them like they’d just appeared in the bathroom or something, but as soon as he said “Librarians” all that fell away. The Librarians! The ones I’d been waiting for!

Like I said. Weird.

“Sure,” I said.

The guy pulled a newspaper clipping out of his pocket. _Newsprint_ newspaper. 

“Is this the Abode of Wonders?” he asked. “Five miracles on permanent display, new miracles appearing daily?”

I shrugged. We sell fudge, too, but Mr. Hartley never puts that in the ads.

The woman stepped forward. “Is there anything extra-magical around here? Anything that makes weird things happen? Anything unusual?”

“We have evidence of many strange and mysterious phenomena,” I said. Actually, most of our exhibits are as fake as jackalopes, but Mr. Hartley wouldn’t want me telling a bunch of tourists that. They might post about it on TripAdvisor.

The woman glanced at the short guy, and then turned back to me. “Can you show us some of these phenomena?”

“Tickets to the display hall are eight bucks,” I said, pointing at the sign on the front of my register.

“Eight bucks?” the short guy said. “That’s freakin’ highway robbery, man.”

The tall guy stepped back. “Pay the lady.”

The short guy grumbled, and then pulled out his wallet to hand me two twenties. He waited for his change. I handed them their tickets and pointed the way into the exhibit.

When it’s really busy, sometimes we have two people working, but mostly Mr. Hartley doesn’t bother. None of the exhibits are worth that much anyway, so he has a closed-circuit camera set up and we’re supposed to watch the tourists on TV while we handle the register in the gift shop.

Normally I don’t bother, but that day I paid attention. They were the only ones in the display hall, and as soon as they got in, the woman whipped some weird electronic thing out of her bag and started scanning the displays. The two guys started walking around, looking at things, but not the way normal tourists look. Most people wander down one side of the hall and then back up the other. These guys were obviously looking for something.

They didn’t find it. An hour later, they came out the door and back into the gift shop.

“That was a waste of twenty-four bucks,” the short guy said.

The tall guy shrugged. “If I had something really magic, I wouldn’t leave it hanging around in a display case at this dump.”

“Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place,” the woman said.

She scanned the gift shop, slowly, and then came up to me and glanced at my name tag. “Donna?”

“It’s Roxie,” I said. Donna’s just the name on my name tag, because when I had a name tag with Roxie on it, creepy old guys kept singing _Roxanne_ to me.

“Right, Roxie.” She smiled. “We’re looking for something, and I’m hoping you can help me. Is there anything unusual in here? Do things ever happen that don’t make sense?”

“People pay eight bucks to look at a bunch of jackalopes,” I said, because that’s always a surprise to me.

The short guy scowled.

“I’m thinking less touristy,” the woman said, carefully. “Like maybe things happen that don’t make sense?”

I stared at her for a long moment. I’d always known someone was going to come check out the real phenomena one day, but….

…but they didn’t seem to know what they were looking for. Or what they were doing. And I couldn’t let them figure it out right then.

“No,” I said. “Can’t say I know of anything like that.”

* * *

After my shift, I biked down to Maddie’s house. Her mom’s always nice about me coming for dinner when my mom’s on nights at the bar. We hung out for a while, talking about Maddie’s latest cat fishing victim — she was pretty sure she’d got some guy in Tulsa on the hook — and then I headed home.

My route home took me by the Abode of Wonders, which is why I noticed the light in the office.

I’m not supposed to go into the office. I do anyway, but I’m not supposed to. And Mr. Hartley was out of town that week, so nobody else should have been in there, either.

I probably should have called 911, but in Mule Butte, that means Chip, the deputy down at the sheriff’s office. I didn’t feel like seeing Chip. He’s a jerk who told my mom my dad was never coming home, and his mother kept coming into the Abode of Wonders to try to get me to go to her creepy church.

I left my bike by the stairs and went inside, quiet as I could manage. When I opened the door, I could hear voices coming from the office.

I crept through the Hall of Wonders, my sneakers quiet on the old oak boards. The office door was ajar.

“—don’t understand why the clippings book sent us here. There’s nothing wrong here.”

The voice — I recognized it. The angry dude.

“If the clippings book says something’s going on, then something’s going on.” The woman. “Ezekiel, are you done with that safe yet?”

“It’s insulting, using the skills of an Ezekiel Jones on a toy like this.” The tall guy. Whose name was Ezekiel, apparently. So all three of them had come back.

And what did he mean, calling that safe a toy? It took me eighteen hours of YouTube tutorials before I figured out how to crack that safe.

I picked up the Authentic Rain Stick from one of the displays. The card next to it says “Cause of 1917 Flood” — tourists always ask which 1917 Flood but the truth is, Mr. Hartley got it at a swap meet and made up everything on the informational card. It’s fake, like most of the other junk on display in the Hall of Wonders, but it is pretty heavy. Maybe I could hit one of them with it.

I swung open the office door. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

The woman’s mouth hung open for a moment. “Roxie!” she said. “Uh, we’re just here for —”

“We’re the Librarians,” the tall guy said, at the same time. He didn’t look up from the safe. “We’re supposed to be here.”

I hefted the rain stick. “No, you’re not.”

The tall guy shrugged at the other two. “Sometimes that works,” he said.

The woman stepped forward.“I’m Cassie, and these guys are Jake and Ezekiel. We think your boss is doing something dangerous, and we’re trying to make sure everyone’s safe.”

“You said you were librarians,” I said.

“We are,” the angry guy growled. Jake, apparently.

“Not librarians like that, but… we are Librarians.” She said it like the word was capitalized. “We’re just trying to make sure everyone’s safe.”

“Guys?” Ezekiel swung the door of the safe open. “Why is the only thing in the safe a roll of duct tape?”

“That’s the artifact we’re looking for,” Jake said. He turned to me. “And you know something about it. Don’t you.”

He didn’t say it like it was a question.

* * *

Mr. Hartley — he’s cheap. Minimum-wage-paying, 40-watt light bulb, no new exhibits in five years cheap. He fixes stuff on the cheap, too. So when he started fixing stuff around the place with duct tape, we didn’t pay any attention.

But then it started getting nice. Like overnight. He’d tape things up with the duct tape, on the back, so it wouldn’t show, and then I’d come in the next day and it’d be shiny and clean and — this is the big part — not broken.

When he fixed the glass in a display case and the next day, the crack was gone, and there wasn’t even any of that nasty duct tape residue we used to get when Mr. Hartley used duct tape to fix something? Something had to be going on.

So I started paying attention, and noticed that Mr. Hartley was locking the roll of duct tape up in the safe after he used it. Which is when I spent those 18 hours on YouTube, learning how to crack the safe.

At first I mostly just used it the way Mr. Hartley did. I fixed my mom’s car, when her starter died, and later on when her brakes weren’t working right. When I got a nasty splinter, dusting the South Seas Idol in the Hall of Wonders, I put a piece of duct tape on it and woke up the new morning to find my skin completely unhurt.

No matter how much duct tape I took, the roll never seemed to get smaller. So I started experimenting.

At first, it didn’t work right if I wasn’t asking it to fix something physical. But then I started concentrating on what I wanted, when I put the duct tape on. I had an argument with Maddie over something stupid, so I put the tape on a picture of the two of us, and focused on us being friends again, and then we were. The next day. Like nothing had ever happened.

* * *

I didn’t tell the Librarians that, of course.

“Roxie?” Jake didn’t look angry now. He looked worried. For me. “Have you been using the duct tape?”

“Maybe,” I said. I lowered the rain stick. “Why?”

“Magic is dangerous,” he said. He looked over at Cassie, and then back at me. “It seems like it’s great at first, like it’s going to solve all your problems. But it doesn’t work that way forever. Eventually there’s a price to pay.”

“I know that,” I whispered. I’m not stupid. I did research, when I was figuring out how it worked. “I’m not doing anything bad with it,” I said. “It only comes back to you three-fold if you do something bad.”

Jake looked over at Cassie, who stepped forward. “It’s more complicated than that,” she said. “Sometimes you might not think it’s bad, but… it might still not be right. Sometimes there can be consequences you don’t expect, and they can be way worse than what you’re trying to fix.”

I thought about my mom and dad’s marriage certificate. It was hidden under my bed, waiting for me to get a little bit better at using the duct tape before I taped it back together.

That’s when everything went wrong. When my dad walked out, and my mom tore their marriage certificate in half and said we were going to be fine without him. But maybe I hadn’t used the duct tape yet because — well, because Mom seemed happier now. Even living in a crummy apartment, worrying about money all the time, she still seemed happier with Dad gone.

“What kind of consequences?” I asked.

“Pretty much anything, mate,” Ezekiel said. “Rain of blood, plague of frogs. The Earth being taken over by ghosts. Monsters.”

“Or it might just not be the right thing,” Cassie said, gently. “Some things aren’t meant to be fixed.”

I put the rain stick down. “You’re going to take it either way, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Cassie said. “We need to. To keep you safe.”

“I need you to help me stage a break-in,” I said. “I don’t want Mr. Hartley to blame me.”

Ezekiel grumbled about breaking a window — “such sloppy work” — but they helped me. We broke one pane of glass, and made it look like someone broke in from outside. When I called Chip the next morning, he didn’t suspect anything.

* * *

I didn’t tell the Librarians that I had one last piece of duct tape, hidden away, waiting to be used.

Only I didn’t use it on my mom and dad’s marriage license. I couldn’t risk something bad happening. Not to my mom.

In the end, I decided to find a place where I could learn more. And it’s out there — a place out east called Wexler University. The course catalog doesn’t say anything about magic, but if you look deep enough — if you check enough Facebook pages and read about the history of the university and sign up for student email groups and get your best friend to catfish a professor for you — you can figure out what’s really going on.

I’m pretty sure it’s the place. 

I used the piece of duct tape to seal my application, and I focused as much as I could before I dropped it in the mail. I must have done well, because Wexler offered me a full scholarship a week later. I start this fall.

I’m going to learn everything there is to know about magic.


End file.
